US troops may enter Pakistan22 Sep, 2006 WASHINGTON: Islamabad’s
delicate ties with the United States is threatening to come apart at the
seams after it was revealed Thursday that the Bush administration threatened
to bomb Pakistan into the ''stone age'' if it did not cooperate in the
war on terror after 9/11.

Disclosure of this startling
fact came from none other than Pakistan’s military ruler Pervez Musharraf
who told CBS 60 Minutes in an interview that the threat by the then US
Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage was relayed to him by his intelligence
chief.

''The intelligence director
told me that (Armitage) said, 'Be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to
go back to the Stone Age’,'' Musharraf told CBS’ Steve Kroft in an interview
that is scheduled to be telecast Sunday evening on the widely watched 60
Minutes program. Asked if he didn’t think the threat was insulting, Musharraf
tells Kroft: ''I think it was a very rude remark.''

But, the Pakistani strongman
tells Kroft, he reacted to it in a responsible way. ''One has to think
and take actions in the interests of the nation, and that's what I did,''
he says, explaining what many Pakistani commentators have since said was
an abject capitulation to the US.

Musharraf’s candid confession
was released by CBS just hours before he was due to meet President Bush
at the White House on Friday morning.

The two have already disagreed
in public over the hunt for Osama bin Laden with Bush saying he would send
US troops into Pakistan if intelligence indicated the fugitive was there
and Musharraf rejecting the idea and retorting Pakistan preferred to do
the job itself.

The latest public exposition
over the post-9/11 threat can only complicate a relationship that many
analysts have seen as tactical at best, and dodgy, cynical and mistrustful
at worst.

Although it is known that
the Bush administration broadly leaned on Pakistan with a ''you are either
for us or against us'' argument, this is the first time anyone has disclosed
how bluntly Washington threatened Pakistan, which sponsored the Taliban
and was the stomping ground for many well-known terrorists, including some
9/11 hijackers According to Washington insiders, the task of bringing Pakistan
on board the anti-terror alliance was left to Secretary of State Colin
Powell, who delegated the job to his deputy Richard Armitage, who had long-standing
ties with the Pakistani military and intelligence going back to the covert
CIA-ISI war in Afghanistan.

All it needed in the hours
after 9/11 was one phone call from Armitage -- and a muscular one it now
turns out -- for Pakistan to buckle under. The subsequent diplomatic triumph
was relayed with great relish by Powell to Bush and other principles gathered
at a White House meeting, according to published accounts.

CBS said Armitage disputed
the language attributed to him but doesn't deny that the message was strong.
Armitage is currently in the doghouse for leaking the name of a CIA agent
to the media in a flap about the US war on Iraq.

Armitage’s threat also recalls
a similar warning by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who told
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in the 1970s that the US would make a ''horrible example''
of Pakistan if insisted on acquiring nuclear weapons. That threat came
to nought.

Whatever the precise language
Armitage used, many Pakistani commentators have subsequently described
the episode as a humiliating capitulation, although Islamabad was hardly
in a position to resist Washington given its patronage of the Taliban,
al Qaeda and a variety of other terrorist elements. To top it, Pakistan
was also exposed subsequently as a nuclear proliferator, a subject on which
CBS extracts a qualified mea culpa from Musharraf.

According to Musharraf, Pakistan
was embarrassed with disclosures about A.Q.Khan’s nuclear proliferation
by CIA Director George Tenet in New York in 2003.

''(Tenet) took his briefcase
out, passed me some papers. It was a centrifuge design with all its numbers
and signatures of Pakistan. It was the most embarrassing moment,'' Musharraf
reveals. He learned then, he says, that not only were blueprints being
given to Iran and North Korea, but the centrifuges themselves — the crucial
technology needed to enrich uranium to weapons grade — were being passed
to them.

''(Khan) gave them centrifuge
designs. He gave them centrifuge parts. He gave them centrifuges.''

Musharraf however denies
that anyone in the government or the military knew of these leaks, despite
what CBS says is the fact that the military was guarding Khan's nuclear
facilities and the total amount of secret material sent from the lab was
more than 18 tons.

''First of all these centrifuges,
or their parts, these are not huge elements. They can be put in your car
and moved,'' Musharraf says. ''(The shipments) were not done once...They
must have been transported many times.''

WASHINGTON: President George
Bush has dropped a bombshell ahead of his Friday meeting at the White House
with Gen. Pervez Musharraf by declaring that US troops would not hesitate
to enter Pakistan in their hunt for Osama bin Laden.

Asked on CNN if he would
order military action inside Pakistan if intelligence indicated bin Laden
and other top terrorists were hiding there, Bush asserted: "Absolutely...absolutely."

"We would take the action
necessary to bring them to justice," Bush said.

The US President's assertion
is a sharp departure from his remarks only last week that Pakistan is a
"sovereign nation" and American troops could not enter the country without
invitation.

But in the days since those
remarks, the US media and strategic community has relentlessly questioned
Pakistan's bonafides in the war on terrorism, topped by critical remarks
by Afghan leader Hamid Karzai.

Gen. Musharraf and Afghanistan's
elected President Hamid Karzai clashed bitterly at the United Nations this
week with each leader asking the other to "do more" to contain the resurgence
of Taliban.

On Wednesday, Karzai virtually
urged US to invade and punish Pakistan for sponsoring terrorism, saying
the war on terrorism could not be won without hitting the root source of
the violence, which he clearly indicated was Pakistan.

Following the Bush-Musharraf
meeting on September 22, Karzai is to meet the US President separately
on September 24, before a trilateral meeting next week with Bush and Musharraf
on September 27.

Bush's remarks on CNN came
as a virtual public rebuke to Musharraf, who only hours before had insisted
to the media in New York that Pakistan will not allow foreign troops on
it territory and would conduct the hunt for bin Laden itself. But US analysts
have questioned Pakistan's commitment in this regard. The considered opinion
in the intelligence community is that bin Laden is Pakistan's insurance
for continued US aid and pandering, and Islamabad has no compelling reason
to capture or kill him.

Bush though frequently chooses
to give Musharraf the benefit of doubt in public. The CNN interview was
no exception - even amid the latest gauntlet he threw about possible incursions
into Pakistan.

"I view President Musharraf
as somebody who would like to bring al-Qaida to justice," Bush told CNN
's Wolf Blitzer. "There's no question there is a kind of a hostile territory
in the remote regions of Pakistan that makes it easier for somebody to
hide."

It is possible that Bush
might have meant a short surgical strike when he spoke of a US hunt for
bin Laden in Pakistan while previously rejecting the idea of stationing
troops on a longer term basis in the country.

Despite Pakistan's protestations
to the contrary, the US military has frequently crossed the border into
Pakistan from Afghanistan in hot pursuit of terrorists.

However, Bush's public disclosure
of a no-holds-barred US policy has put Musharraf in a spot given his public
insistence that Pakistan has the sovereign right to decline foreign intervention
in the hunt for bin Laden and do the job on its own.

For that slight alone, Bush
is expected to praise the Pakistani dictator even more during his Friday
call at the White House despite urging from many analysts that he has to
hold the general's feet to the fire.

"America's staunchest ally
presides over the breeding grounds of the very people who seek to kill
as many Americans as they can, while US taxpayers foot the bill," Pakistani-American
analyst Manzoor Ijaz wrote in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday in an
op-ed piece titled "Musharrafstan," pointing out that the general was in
cahoots with radicals despite his protestations to enlightened moderation.

Pakistan, he said, needed
innovative solutions to move away from its radical path, and Musharraf
was not the man to deliver them.

WASHINGTON: Islamabad’s
delicate ties with the United States is threatening to come apart at the
seams after it was revealed Thursday that the Bush administration threatened
to bomb Pakistan into the ''stone age'' if it did not cooperate in the
war on terror after 9/11.